Qualified to Be President

Qualified to Be President

There is a frost over the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. George 
Bush, was impressed with Putin and said when he looked into his eyes, he 
could "see his soul", whatever that is supposed to mean.  Recently Joe 
Biden's comments about an impending crisis being all but "guaranteed" 
should be jolting reminder to just how much an inexperienced President can 
misinterpret conditions and making the wrong decisions could have 
catastropic implications for American national security.

McCain is an opportunity for America to have as president the most
qualified person in America, motivated by his experiences and
dedicated to national security by his love of country.

From:
THE ORDEAL OF JOHN McCAIN: The Right Stuff in the Wrong War
Blaine Taylor writing in Sea Classics (September 1, 2006):

(Quotes)

What happened next propelled him into the history books of the Vietnam War
as its most-famous American POW, to the US House of Representatives and
Senate and then on to the race for the Presidency in 2000.

According to author Robert Timberg, "Hanoi was now more heavily defended
against air attack than any city in history." McCain was about to learn
what that meant. "Closing on the target, he weaved through air bursts and
hurtled past Surface-to-Air (SAM) missiles that looked like airborne
telephone poles. His instrument panel lit up, telling him a SAM had locked
onto his aircraft. He punched out some chafe to confuse the missile's
guidance system, then rolled in and released his bombs. He was pulling out
of his dive when a SAM took off his right wing, sending his plane into a
violent downward spiral."

The Soviet-built SAMs were first used in Vietnam on 24 July 1965 against a
flight of four US Air Force F4C aircraft. Notes Patrick K. Parker,
"Codenamed the SA-2 Guideline by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) and known to the Soviets as the S-75, this missile ushered in a new
era in air combat." SA-2 missiles carried a high-explosive warhead of
approximately 300-lbs. This missile could reach speeds up to Mach 3.5, but
not until it was well over 25,000-ft in altitude ... By 1972, the DRVs SAM
system was one of the most sophisticated and formidable in the world.
Through 1968 alone, it was partially responsible for the downing of 922
fixed-wing aircraft over the DRV.

"The system also forced the United States to respond by developing an
equally sophisticated method of aerial attack. This method, which included
new aircraft, early precision guided munitions, and substantial
improvements in electronic warfare, did slow the rate of US losses, but it
never completely overcame the threat posed by DRV SAMs."

Here is how then-Lt. McCain recalled what happened next: "I knew I was
hit. ... I radioed Tm hit,' reached up and pulled the ejection seat
handle. I struck part of the airplane, breaking my left arm, my right arm
in three places, and my right knee, and I was briefly knocked unconscious
by the force of the ejection. Witnesses said my chute had barely opened
when I plunged into the shallow water of True Bach Lake. I landed in the
middle of the lake, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day."
He adds wryly, "An escape attempt would have been challenging."

He recalls regaining consciousness when he broke the surface of the water,
but, dragged down by 50-lbs of gear, rapidly touched bottom before he
could kick off with his still undamaged one leg. Unable to pull the toggle
on his life vest, he sank a second time to the bottom, then again reached
the surface, and succeeded in inflating the vest with his teeth before
blacking out.

Hauled to the shore by a crowd of 20 North Vietnamese, he was beaten,
stabbed, kicked, spit on, stripped and struck - and had his shoulder
broken by the fierce buttstrike of a rifle. He was saved by a woman who
"applied bamboo splints to [his] leg and right arm." He was taken by an
NVA truck to a French-built prison called Hoa Lo, nicknamed the "Hanoi
Hilton" by the American POW residents.

He stuck religiously to the Serviceman's Code of Conduct, providing his
captors only with name, rank, serial number and date of birth - but
refused to divulge any other sort of military information. In return, he
was given further beatings and denied any medical care.

In a piece entitled "Surrogates" by writer Michael Lewis that appeared in
the 25 April 1996 edition of The New Republic, he states, "McCain survived
in captivity without medical treatment for the next five years, enduring
torture so exquisite that even to read about it causes sweat to pop out on
your brow; his captors would hang him by his broken arms from dangling
ropes for hours on end, for instance."

But the astonishing part of McCain's experience was its voluntary aspect.
McCain is the third generation of a distinguished military family; his
father was an admiral during the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese hoped
that this famous POW would violate US military policy, which dictated that
prisoners be returned in the order they arrived.

In accepting their offer of freedom, McCain would testify to the
demoralization of American troops. For five-and-a-half years his captors
tried to torture him into going home. For five-and-a-half years he refused
to go.

In The Nightingale's Song, author Timberg details what POW McCain looked
like just two months after his capture: "McCain weighed less than
100-pounds. His hair, flecked with gray since high school, was nearly
snow-white. Clots of food clung to his face, neck, hair and beard. His
cheeks were sunken, his neck chicken-like, his legs atrophied.

"His knee bore a fresh surgical slash, his ankle an angry scar from the
bayonet wound. His right arm, little more than skin and bone, protruded
like a stick, but it was McCain's eyes that riveted (his cell-mate George)
Day. 'His eyes I'll never forget, were just burning bright. They were
bugeyed, like you see in those pictures from the Jewish concentration
camps. His eyes were real pop-eyed like that. I said, The gooks have
dumped this guy on us so they can blame us for killing him, because I
didn't think he was going to live out the day."'

But he did, long enough to author a December 1984 article in Reader's
Digest entitled "Joyful and Triumphant: A True Story of Christmas Eve,
Contemporary and Eternal," in which he described how he and his fellow
POWs observed Christmas Eve of 1971: "Still burning in our memories was
the time almost a year before, when North Vietnamese guards had burst into
our church service, beaten the three men leading the prayers, and dragged
them away to confinement. "The rest of us were locked away for eleven
months in three-by-five-foot cells. Indeed, this Christmas service was in
part a defiant celebration of the return to our regular prison in
Hanoi....

"We had forgotten our wounds, our hunger, our pain. We raised prayers of
thanks for the Christ child, for our families and homes, for our country.

"There was an absolute exquisite feeling that all our burdens had been
lifted. In a place designed to turn men into vicious animals, we clung to
one another, sharing what comfort we had."

In the 21 and 28 October 1996 issues of The New Yorker, writer James
Carroll described the 1993 journey back to Hanoi that by-then-US Senator
from Arizona John McCain took with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John
Kerry, another Navy Viet Vet: "Kerry told me about the visit to the
prison, describing a walk down a corridor toward McCain's old cell - 'At
the back end of the right-hand side as we walked in, around the corner...
was just this very small, dank cell, with a little bed area, hardly fit
for anybody.'

"In a recent interview with McCain, I asked him to describe the cell.
'Nine or 10-ft by 7-ft,' he said, 'a little teeny window up at the top
that was barred; a metal door that had what we used to call a peep door in
it, where the guard can open it and look in at you.'

"McCain had communicated with the man in the next cell by tapping on the
wall and listening to taps that came back. News passed along by this tap
code included reports of antiwar activity at home. Peace activists like
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda showed up at the Hanoi Hilton during McCain's
imprisonment. He always refused to meet with them."

In 1996, when the Senator placed in nomination the name of fellow war
veteran Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas for the GOP top spot, he referred to his
two-and-a-half years spent in solitary confinement at Hoa Lo Prison. "A
long time ago, in another walk of life, I was deprived of my liberty," he
stated, and he would later recall to author Carroll what it was like to be
there.

"John McCain had put himself to sleep at night by memorizing the names of
his fellow POWs. Tou start with the As,' he told me, and he went on to
describe how, through the tap code, he learned of the arrival of new
prisoners. 'And you fill them in to where they are in the alphabet. ... I
would just associate the names: 'Brudno' with 'brute'; Baker, and I'd
think of a loaf of bread. I would remember the number of names, under each
letter.'

"Night after night for years, McCain maintained a mental file of the names
of perhaps 170 captives. This and other acts of POW memorization were the
beginning of The List."

All of these experiences would serve to inculcate in later candidate
McCain a love of country that brought standing ovations on the campaign
trail - even after he had lost the Republican Presidential nomination to
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, as I witnessed at Easton, Maryland, on 23
September that year.

In the 26 April 1999 edition of The Weekly Standard, writer David Brooks
quoted him at a 1998 ceremony honoring President Ronald Reagan as stating,
"I fell in love with my country while I was in prison. I had loved her
before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than
a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges we enjoyed and
usually took for granted. It wasn't until I lost America for a time that I
realized how much I loved her."

The roots of the Senator and former (and perhaps future) Presidential
candidate's patriotism are both natural and deep, as noted in a 1973
profile on the then just-released POW that appeared in US News and World
Report. "In 1906, the first John S. McCain was graduated from the US Naval
Academy at Annapolis. He served in WWI as a junior officer. In WWII, he
rose to the rank of a fourstar admiral in the Pacific Theater. At war's
end, he witnessed the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

"In 1931, John S. McCain, Jr., won his commission as an ensign at
Annapolis. He compiled a brilliant record as a submarine commander in
WWII. Then he became a top admiral, climaxing his Navy career as
Commander-in-Chief of all US forces in the Pacific. He retired in 1972.

"In 1958, John S. McCain III left Annapolis as an ensign and went on to
win his wings at Pensacola. He served as a Navy flier in the Caribbean
during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. His first mission over North
Vietnam was in mid-1967."

In that same USN & WR piece, the Senator was asked, "What was the major
lesson you learned from your return to Vietnam?" to which he responded,
"My trip back evoked memories not of my own discomfort, but the fact that
a lot of my close friends didn't come back and gave their lives in what
most Americans describe as a vain effort.

"My thinking about them again reinforces my opinion that the United States
should not send its young men to fight and die in a conflict unless the
goal is victory."

This was the same tack taken by his late predecessor in the United States
Senate from Arizona - Sen. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Presidential nominee
- in both his book JVo Substitute for Victory and that campaign. Indeed,
alone among the primary election candidates in 2000, only Sen. McCain
called for winning our on-going war in the Balkans should we remain there.

He also talked with USN & WR about the people of North Vietnam and their
reactions to his return as well as his to them. "They still [in 1985]
stick to this myth that the prisoners were well-treated. I did not see any
of my captors or guards. I hold no animosity toward the Vietnamese people,
because I have hundreds of Vietnamese friends who fought on the side of
the South.

"But if I had seen one of my former captors, I'm afraid that might have
been a bit more of a trial than I would like to have experienced. The
Vietnamese people that I talked to always through an interpreter seemed to
harbor little or no animosity toward me. In fact, they expressed a great
deal of curiosity and perhaps even pleasure that I was there.

"There was one interesting episode at a monument to my capture built by a
lake in downtown Hanoi. This was the lake I parachuted into and was pulled
out of on 26 October 1967. I still don't understand why they built this
monument. They even have the wrong branch of service - Air Force instead
of Navy.

"Anyway, Walter Cronkite and I and a film crew went down there one day to
the statue. A very large crowd of Vietnamese gathered, all pointing to me
and repeating my name 'Mahcain, Mahcain.' It was perhaps the only time
that someone was more recognized than Walter Cronkite!"

His being shot down over Hanoi was presaged, in an eerie sense, by the
appearance on 7 October 1967 just 19 days before the event - of an article
in The Saturday Evening Post by writer Trevor Armbrister entitled "Fire!
Fire! Flight Deck Aft!" in which the then-30-year-old officer was a major
character. The incident took place the previous July aboard the carrier
USS Forrestal, named for a former secretary of the Navy.

"McCain was hunched over the controls of his A-4 Skyhawk. His plane was
third in line for launch, and he had almost completed his preflight
checks. Trim setting - OK. Gauges, lights, altimeter, electronics gear -
all OK Then an object - perhaps a missile - streaked across the flight
deck.

"'I heard a whooshy sound,' McCain recalls. 'I looked up. Fuel was
spreading all around my plane, and the fire was following. Men were
running out with their clothes on fire; other men were jumping on them. I
disconnected the straps and opened my canopy. The flames were more intense
to the rear, so I climbed out to the refueling probe on the nose, jumped
about 10-ft and rolled through the edge of the fire.

"'I saw a chief petty officer running across the deck with a bottle of PKP
extinguisher in his hand. He headed toward the flames, and then he was in
the flames. I looked back and saw another pilot from my squadron leaping
from his plane. He fell into the fire. He was burning. I started to run
toward him. Some men with a fire hose passed me. Then the first bomb
exploded. I was knocked down. The pilot, the chief, the firemen - they
disappeared.'

"Wounded by shrapnel in his chest, legs and knee, McCain stumbled to the
catwalk, then made his way through billowing smoke down to a hangar bay.
There he spotted his friend, 35-year-old L/Cmdr. Herbert A. Hope. 'God, am
I glad to see you,' McCain exclaimed. 'I thought you were dead.'"

Then, a little over two weeks later, came McCain's own real ordeal. He
recalled later, "I admire President Nixon's courage.... He had to take the
most unpopular decisions that I could imagine - the mining, the blockade,
the bombing. I know it was very, very difficult for him to do that, but
that was the thing that ended the war.

"I think the reason he understood this is that he had a long background in
dealing with these people. He knows how to use the carrot and the stick.
Obviously, his trip to China and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
(SALT) with Russia were based on the fact that we're stronger than the
Communists, so they were willing to negotiate.

"Force is what they understood, and that's why it's difficult for me to
understand now, when everybody knows that the bombing finally got a
cease-fire agreement, why people are still criticizing his foreign policy
- for example, the bombing of Cambodia.

"Right after the Communist Tet Offensive in 1968, the North Vietnamese
were riding high. They knew President Johnson was going to stop the
bombing... a month before those elections. In May of 1968, I was
interviewed by two North Vietnamese generals at different times. Both of
them said to me, in almost these words: 'After we liberate South Vietnam
we're going to liberate Cambodia, and after Cambodia, we're going to
liberate Laos, and after we liberate Laos, we're going to liberate
Thailand; and after we liberate Thailand, we're going to liberate
Malaysia, and then Burma. We're going to liberate all of Southeast Asia.'
They left no doubt in my mind that it was not a question of South Vietnam
alone.

"Some people's favorite game is to refute the 'domino theory,' but the
North Vietnamese themselves never tried to refute it. They believe it. Ho
Chi Minh said many, many times: "We are proud to be in the front line of
armed struggle between the socialist camp and the US imperialist
aggressors.' Now, this doesn't mean fighting for nationalism. It doesn't
mean fighting for an independent South Vietnam. It means what he said.
This is what Communism is all about - armed struggle to overthrow the
capitalist countries.

"I read a lot of their history. They gave us propaganda books. I learned
that Ho Chi Minh was a Stalinist. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the
late 1950s, Ho Chi Minh did not go along with it. He was not a 'peaceful
coexistence' Communist.

"At this particular juncture - after Tet in 1968 - they thought they had
the war won. They had gotten Gen. Westmoreland fired. They were convinced
that they had wrecked Johnson's chances for reelection, and they thought
that they had the majority of the American people on their side. That's
why these guys were speaking very freely as to what their ambitions were.
They were speaking prematurely, because they had misjudged the caliber of
President Nixon," asserted McCain in 1973.

He also mentioned a man with whom he would later see service in the United
States Senate - Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts: 'Ted Kennedy was
quoted again and again, as was [the late former Ambassador] W. Averill
Harriman. Clark Clifford was another favorite, right after he had been
secretary of Defense under President Johnson. When [former US Attorney
General] Ramsay Clark came over, they thought that was a great coup for
their cause.

"The big furor over release of The Pentagon Papers was a tremendous boost
for Hanoi. It was advanced as proof of the 'black imperialist schemes'
that they had been talking about all those years."

There was hope for the POWs, however, as Rep. McCain later recalled with
relish: "Finally came the day Ã1 never forget - the 18th of December 1972.
The whole place exploded when the Christmas bombing ordered by President
Nixon began. They hit Hanoi right off the bat! It was the most spectacular
show 111 ever see.

"By then, we had large windows in our rooms. These had been covered with
bamboo mats, but in October 1972, they took them down. We had about a
120-degree view of the sky, and, of course, at night you can see all the
flashes. The bombs were dropping so close that the building would shake.
The SAMs were flying all over and the sirens were whining - it was really
a wild scene.

"When a B-52 would get hit - they're up at more than 30,000-ft - it would
light up the whole sky. There would be a red glow that made it almost like
daylight, and it would last for a long time, because they'd fall a long
way.

"We knew at that time that unless something very forceful was done we were
never going to get out of there. We were fully aware that the only way
that we were ever going to get out was for our government to turn the
screws on Hanoi, so we were very happy. We were cheering and hollering....
The only reason why the North Vietnamese began negotiating in October 1972
was because they could read the polls as well as you and I can, and they
knew that Nixon was going to have an overwhelming reelection bid, so they
wanted to negotiate a cease-fire before the elections."

The news the POWs received was all controlled, of course, he recalled
later. "The North Vietnamese gave us very little except bad news about the
US. We didn't find out about the first successful Moon shot until it was
mentioned in a speech by [antiwar South Dakota US Sen.] George McGovern
saying that Nixon could put a man on the Moon, but he couldn't put an end
to the Vietnam War.

"They bombarded us with the news of Martin Luther King's death and the
riots that followed. Information like that poured continuously out of the
loudspeakers."

When he returned home, L/Cmdr. McCain was welcomed back as a hero, and has
remained so since, as this writer has personally witnessed. In 1995,
author Timberg wrote of him, "Last year at the dedication of the National
Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Georgia, former Attorney General
Griffin Bell, a Democrat, introduced Sen. John McCain, the featured
speaker, with these words: 'We often hear people now say, where are our
heroes, where have all our heroes gone? Well, Senator McCain is an
authentic, living American hero.'

"Over the years, the Arizona Senator with the hard-won head of white hair
has survived three plane crashes, a firestorm at sea, North Vietnamese
prison camps, a national scandal (the Keating Five Savings and Loan
imbroglio), as well as his own mercurial and lusty temperament, to emerge
as a major player on the national political stage....

"He has defined himself as a mainstream conservative, though neither a
dogmatic nor a predictable one. He has earned a reputation for
independence that some say borders on stubbornness while displaying a
willingness to take on tough, often thankless issues. He is called a
maverick, which in some ways is accurate and may appeal to voters, but the
term can be a two-edged sword in that it may trivialize the
decade-and-a-half that he has spent in Congress as a hardworking,
effective legislator."

Significantly, the Senator chose to subtitle his autobiography Faith of My
Fathers, "A Family Memoir," and explains why in the work's preface: "A
survivor of Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl, wrote movingly of how man controls
his own destiny when captive to a great evil. 'Everything can be taken
from man but one thing: The last of human freedoms - to choose one's own
attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.'

"I have spent much of my life choosing my own attitude, often carelessly,
often for no better reason than to indulge a conceit. In those instances,
my acts of selfdetermination were mistakes, some of which did no lasting
harm, and serve now only to embarrass, and occasionally amuse, the old man
who recalls them.

"Others I deeply regret.

"At other times, I chose my own way with good cause and to good effect. I
did not do so to apologize for my mistakes. My contrition is a separate
matter. When I chose well I did so to keep a balance in my life a balance
between pride and regret, between liberty and honor.

"My grandfather was a Naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my
first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition
of my life. They have been dead many years now, yet I still aspire to live
my life according to the terms of their approval. They were not men of
spotless virtue, but they were honest, brave and loyal all their lives.

"For two centuries, the men of my family were raised to go to war as
officers in America's armed forces. It is a family history that - as a boy
- often intimidated me - and, for a time, I struggled halfheartedly
against its expectations, but when my own time at war had arrived, I
realized how fortunate I was to have been raised in such a family.

"From both my parents, I learned to persevere, but my mother's
extraordinary resilience made her the stronger of the two. I acquired some
of her resilience and her felicity, and that inheritance made an enormous
difference in my life. Our family lived on the move, rooted not in a
location, but in the culture of the Navy.

"I learned from my mother not just to take the constant disruptions in
stride, but to welcome them as elements of an interesting life.

"The United States Naval Academy, an institution I both resented and
admired, tried to bend my resilience to a cause greater than
self-interest. I resisted its exertions, fearing its effect on my
individuality, but as a prisoner of war, I learned that a shared purpose
did not claim my identity.

"On the contrary, it enlarged my sense of myself. I have the example of
many brave men to thank for that discovery, all of them proud of their
singularity, but faithful to the same cause.

"First made a migrant by the demands of my father's career, in time I
became selfmoving, a rover by choice. In such a life, some fine things are
left behind, and missed, but bad times are left behind as well. You move
on, remembering the good, while the bad grows obscure in the distance.

"I left the war behind me, and never let the worst of it encumber my
progress."

As part of the process of putting the war behind him, Sen. McCain made his
individual peace with such figures as Tom Hayden, by shaking hands during
an unexpected meeting at a television studio, and by working with Sen.
Kerry on the POWMlA issue, and then there was the situation with
Democratic President Bill Clinton, as described in Mr. Carroll's
insightful piece already mentioned.

On 4 February 1994, a New York Times headline read "Clinton Drops Trade
Embargo on Vietnam." Above it appeared the most wrenching photograph of
the war - the one of the naked girl amid other children running toward the
camera away from what the caption called "an aerial napalm strike in
1972."

Then, on 11 July 1995, the President summoned Cabinet members, the top
military brass, Congressional leaders, and the heads of veterans' groups
and others to the White House. He declared, "Today I am announcing the
normalization of diplomatic relations with North Vietnam. This moment
offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted
time for too long. We can now move on to common ground.

"Whatever divided us before let us consign to the past. Let this moment,
in the words of the Scripture, be a time to heal, and a time to build."

Then Bill Clinton turned to the man next to him, John McCain. They began
by shaking hands, but then embraced emotionally. The President turned next
to John Kerry.

The Arizona Senator can even joke a little about the war, as when he heard
that a hotel was going to replace the prison that for him and his fellow
POWs was once called "The Hanoi Hilton":

When I saw it, they asked me what I thought. I said, 'I hope room service
is better than it was when I was here!"'


    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    The writer wishes to thank McCain Senate Deputy Press Secretary Ms.
    Sophia H. Kim for her help in obtaining references and providing
    photographs for this article.

    ADDITIONAL READING

    John McCain: An American Odyssey by Robert Timberg, 1999.

    Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir by John McCain with Mark Salter,
    1999.

    The Linebacker Raids: The Bombing of North Vietnam, 1972 by John T.
    Smith, 1998.

    Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, edited by Spencer Tucker, 1998.


(END QUOTE)

Hank Roth
In Your Face - http://inyourface.info/




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